LEONARD COHEN, 106 FIND ME, I AM ALMOST THIRTY Amit Ranjan Some verses touch hearts Some touch other parts. Someone said to me That old man burns a hole Right inside your soul. He drags your pain out of your heart And then draws an anatomical chart Dissects you for fun And some lazy pun The old surgeon is so ruthless He leaves no scar He should have been dead Or at least toothless But look he’s laughing at the bar. Ladies and gentlemen, Mister Leonard Cohen. ister Cohen also has a sister Cohen: Esther Cohen. She passed away last year. I recently realized this, that she had passed away, and that Mthe writer Esther Cohen who’s very much around, is not the sister Cohen. I would have known this had I been a true Cohen fan, actively following the threads on the Leonard Cohen Forum. But I’m not. I am a lazy listener who listens to his songs, and tries indolently to write songs like him. I even wrote lazy emails to Ed Sanders, his manager, who lazily wrote back to me that he will try to show my poems to Leonard. Leonard never lazily read my poetry, or if he did, he never lazily wrote back to me. I have all the time to keep on writing, and I am sure he has all the time to know about the would-be Indian poet and indulge him a little. Time is The Equator Line | 107 Leonard Cohen, Find Me, I am almost Thirty always full, it’s we who go into a lull. Yes, I know ‘full’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘lull’, but there’s this thing called a slant rhyme which applies here. And do you know what another name for slant rhyming is? Lazy rhyming. If Cohen can make ‘Marianne’ and ‘began’ rhyme in the song ‘So Long Marianne’, I can try some odd combinations too. Coming back to the matter of the deceased sister Cohen, the writer Esther Cohen must have been flummoxed, for there must have been anonymous readers of hers who thought it was her and not her. For the writer Esther is quite Cohenesque – her style of writing. She wrote on her blog that she receives Google updates about her name, and there were quite a few when the sister Cohen died. She also received a recent update about another namesake having written a book called Epidermis. So many homonyms, namesakes floating around in the deluge of information overload. Sometimes you feel it isn’t worth working for one’s name, for the number of namesakes and lookalikes and body doubles crashing around on the web. Unlike Cohen, who would go on to say, ‘J’ai changé cent fois de nom,’ we can’t all change our names a hundred times. Needless to say, there is only one Leonard Cohen – Mister Leonard Cohen who has lasted from the age of LPs to the rage of MP3s, from the age of being a radio star, a survivor from the time when he sang a song about getting fellatio from Janis Joplin (‘Chelsea Hotel #2’, New Skin for Old Ceremony, 1974), to when he crooned, ‘I ache in the places where I used to play’ (‘Tower of Song’, I’m Your Man, 1988). Of course, our man did not age that fast between 1974 and 1988, but it’s a prophetic song. Cohen turned 80 last year, and celebrated the milestone with a new album, Popular Problems; ‘Almost like the blues’ from this album is still a rage. When he turned 70, Tim de Lisle came up with an article, ‘Hallelujah: 70 things about Leonard Cohen at 70’, in which he says with wry and celebratory Cohenesque humour, ‘His vocals have gone from a limited but appealing wail to a heroically smoky rumble. Soon, he may be audible only to dogs.’ Cohen himself has said that his voice can barely carry a tune. There are hundreds of cover versions of his songs, in perhaps more complex rhythms and more skilled musical milieus, and yet somehow it’s his deep baritone, in which they sound perfect. 108 | The Equator Line Leonard Cohen, Find Me, I am almost Thirty Cohen has perfected the art of using the word ‘perfect’. e places where the word appears, the usage is expectedly ironical, but there’s something more to it. In a literary sense, it is a deconstructionist use, or in Cohen’s own inimitable words, ‘ere’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’ (One must mark the oeat rhyme here too – ‘thing’ and ‘in’). Let’s take a look at some of the perfect uses of ‘perfect’: ‘Ring the bells that can still ring/ Forget your perfect oering/ Mr. Perfect ere’s a crack in everything/ at’s how the light gets in.’ (Selected Poems, 1956-1968, and the song ‘Anthem’ from the album e Future, 1992) ‘e candles burned/ e moon went down/ e polished hill/ e milky town/ Transparent, weightless, luminous/ Uncovering the two of us/ On that fundamental ground/ Where love’s unwilled, unleashed, / Unbound/ And half the perfect world is found’ (Anjani and Leonard Cohen, ‘Half the Perfect World’, Blue Alert, 2006) ‘It was only when you walked away I saw you had the perfect ass. Forgive me for not falling in love with your face or your conversation.’ (Poetry collection – e Energy of Slaves, 1972) ere are three distinct avours to the quotes above, and yet each of these perfects is about imperfections, about cracks, about dysfunctionalities. For the last quote and for many like that (for example, ‘they don’t let a woman kill you, not in the tower of song’) Cohen has never been accused of being a misogynist. is may be because there’s a certain gender neutrality, an air of universality, to his loneliness, to his desolation. The Equator Line | 109 Leonard Cohen, Find Me, I am almost Thirty Another favourite Cohen-word of mine is ‘almost’. He has, however, never used the phrase ‘almost perfect’. Tautology is not Mr. Cohen’s business. Let’s begin with the latest – ‘Almost like the Blues’. In a career spanning almost five decades, there have been shifts in Cohen’s style, and that’s how he has almost survived, or maybe survived perfectly. His voice turns very political, intertwines the personal and the political, say, in his album The Future (1992) in which his dystopic vision condemns the culture of conspicuous consumption and the rapacity of the powers that be. ‘Almost like the blues’ is a part of this style shift – ‘I saw some people starving/There was murder, there was rape/Their villages were burning/ They were trying to escape/I couldn’t meet their glances/I was staring at my shoes/It was acid, it was tragic/It was almost like the blues’ (Leonard Cohen and Leonard Patrick, Popular Problems, 2014). Another place where ‘almost’ is almost unforgettable in ‘So Long Marianne’ – ‘We met when we were almost young/ Deep in the green lilac park/ You held on to me like I was a crucifix/ As we went kneeling through the dark.’ The ‘almost young’ haunts the listener here – it calls out to the young and the old, and maybe the dead. Also, the shift in the imagery from ‘lilac park’ to ‘crucifix’ is typically Cohen. The Sufis celebrated the intertwining ishq majazi and ishq hakiki, that is the carnal and the spiritual, but Cohen turns that idea on its head. He weds the Eros and the Thanatos, while retaining the tradition of wedding the secular and the mystic. The packing of this intense energy is his signature – the man is notorious for spending years and years editing one song. He is clearly conscious of the irony of Wordsworth’s idea of poetry being ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings… emotions recollected in tranquility.’ The song that I have consciously avoided till now – ‘Hallelujah’, arguably the most celebrated Cohen song, took five years and eighty drafts to reach the studio version. Cohen says, ‘There are two schools of songwriting, the quick and me.’ That he has had only 13 studio albums in a career of fifty years is a testimony to this claim. In an interview, he says that being a poet is like being a daily wage labourer; one goes to seek something every day, but one is never sure if one will find anything every day. 110 | The Equator Line Leonard Cohen, Find Me, I am almost Thirty Another place where Cohen uses ‘almost’ and which is most memorable for me, is a poem in Select Poems (1956-68). It goes like this – ‘Marita/ Please find me/ I am almost 30/ This is my voice/ but I am only whispering/ The amazing vulgarity of your style/invites men to think of torturing you to death.’ I do not remember this from the poetry collection, but from a documentary about Leonard Cohen, made way back in 1965. The documentary, titled Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Leonard Cohen, was produced by the National Film Board of Canada, and directed by Don Owen and Donald Brittain. The idea was a series of documentaries about contemporary poets, but the project was abandoned after the first film, for the others were allegedly not as charismatic as Cohen. In the documentary, it’s shown that Cohen has scribbled these lines – ‘Marita/ Please find me/ I am almost thirty’ on the wall of Le Bistro on Rue de la Montagne. The poets would gather at a lot of these pubs and bistros.